Big Plans... for the weekend

I'm glad we're going to the Law Enforcement BBQ tonight. That'll be good eatin'. And I'm really looking forward to sleeping in tomorrow. Later, I'll head to I-Fest and wait for S to get there at 8pm for George Clinton!!! Sunday I have to go patrol. Should be fun as always.

The BBQ is held every year at the Farm and Ranch Club. It's quite a drive out in west Houston. It's where we had our day of police driving and testing in the academy. There were several driving tests, and we had to set up the courses ourselves with a couple of hundred orange cones. I got to drive the white van full of all the cones and I was in a God-awful mood thanks to my car having been towed the night before at the Prince concert. Anyway, the hardest course was the last one, which had 3 separate sections and one of them had to be driven backwards! Of the 200+ cones you could only knock down 6 of them, or else you failed. Keep in mind, you had to do all the tests within a certain amount of time, as well! The final, hard test was to be done in under 2:25 minutes or something like that. I knocked down 4 cones and finished in something like 2:10. I did it by praying! Here's some pic's from that day, courtesy of Mudflap:

Taken from a safe distance away. One of us is in the white patrol car and the instructors are in the dark, undercover vehicle, following and timing us. Also some of the tests required fast stopping at, for example, the next-to-the-last cone and the instructors had to observe that we did it right.

Some of my esteemed fellow cadets. I was in an antisocial mood that day and didn't mingle much, so there's no pic's of me. Plus, I'd been assigned to share a car with my nemesis and another guy who, while riding in the backseat while I was driving, got sick and had to be let out! Ha ha! I forgave him later when he gave me the good tip to not use my mirrors while driving backwards, but to turn and look. That worked much better for me!

Ok, I better get back to work here. Dr. P has called in 2 more lit. searches and they are always interesting. Now I get to research another mental illness related to an individual publicized in recent media stories, but b/c HIPAA applies to me too, I can't discuss it for now. However, since I've had to do research for him in the past on Andrea Yates and that creepy JonBenet Ramsey claimed killer, rest assured, this latest one is also fascinating!